The light turns green, but before we start moving again, a charcoal gray minivan lays on its horn as it drives by. I look over in time to see the lady from the diner flipping me off as she streaks by.
“Oh fuck, she’s found us! Evasive maneuvers! Evasive maneuvers!” I order, pointing in the opposite direction of the van.
Tears drip down Rogan’s face as he guffaws and revels in my misery. I fold my arms over my chest and shake my head at his insensitive, immature ways.
What an asshole.
After about five minutes and another dead arm, he starts to calm down. He releases a satisfied high-pitched sigh to signal the conclusion of his laughing fit, wiping at his eyes and opening and closing the hand of the arm that I punched twice.
“Oh fuck, I needed that,” he coos, another fit threatening to sweep him away. Thankfully, he keeps it together, but the wide smile on his face is annoying as hell.
“You want to tell me what happened?” he asks in an effort to be kind, but each word gets higher and higher in pitch, and I can tell he’s on the cusp of another cackling sesh.
“No, I don’t. Needless to say, I think my ancestors set me up for the scolding they got earlier,” I clip haughtily.
For some reason, this just sets Rogan off again. I sigh and try not to succumb to the contagion in his laughter. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of laughing too. But man is it hard. He has an epic laugh. I don’t think I’ve ever heard happiness sound so good on someone. I take some consolation in the fact that he really did need this. With everything that’s happened to him, he deserves all the laughing fits he can get, and as much as I want to, I can’t begrudge him that.
Two dead arms are adequate punishment.
“Does Marx know what’s up with you and Elon?” I ask when he starts to come down from his laugh high again.
“We’ve never talked to him about it, but I think he suspects there’s more to the story. Elon and I always say it’s a matter of time before his need to question everything has him straight up asking us. But so far, he keeps his suspicions to himself.”
I nod and watch the trees streak by the window as we turn down a two-lane road, and the car picks up speed. I wondered why Rogan seemed to live out in the middle of nowhere, but it makes sense now.
“Do you run into trouble with people in the magical community? Like, this coven we’re going to, or Riggs, do they not care about your status?”
“Not everybody knows who I am on sight, so I have that working in my favor in some cases,” he explains. “Riggs and the lycans don’t seem bothered by it. Maybe that has to do with the fact that they were outcasts for a long time in magical society, so they’re more forgiving of that title or status. Or it could just be that Riggs measures people by who they are and nothing else, so if he’s cool with me, most of the others are too,” he goes on, and I smile. I could see that about Riggs.
“The coven we’re going to today is my aunt’s coven. My father’s sister,” he clarifies, when I shoot him a surprised look.
“Does she know?”
“She knows the kind of people my parents are. She doesn’t know details about anything. In fact, she tells us she doesn’t want to know, but Alora knew Elon and me well enough not to buy what was being said about us.”
“Does she know why we’re coming?”
Rogan shoots me a look like he’s questioning how I’ll react to whatever it is that he’s going to say. “She knows we’re coming, but she doesn’t like to talk about details when it comes to anything. She’s a very hippie, let-the-magic-guide-her kind of person.”
“What kind of witch is she?” I ask, trying to picture which of the branches could lean more toward free love and hippie.
“My father and Alora are twins. She happens to be a Soul Witch too,” he tells me, and I’m taken aback by that.
I know Rogan said that lots of older families have more than one branch of magic in their line, but it’s still weird to hear about as it’s so different from how I thought it all worked.
“And what about her coven, are they all Animamancers too?”
“There’s a couple others. The rest are Corium Witches,” he reveals.
“Well, this should be interesting then,” I mumble more to myself than to him.
“It’s no being hunted by a PTA mom, but it most definitely will be interesting,” he teases with a wag of his eyebrows, cracking himself up.
Nope, I was wrong. Three dead arms is adequate punishment.
21
We pull up to a stone house that looks as though it’s been plucked directly from the English countryside. There’s a waist-high wrought iron fence that’s wrapped around the perimeter of the home, and inside the decorative iron bars is the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen. It’s like every witch’s paradise, with planter boxes teaming with herbs, vined plants overtaking trellises, and flowers and trees dotting every inch in between. It’s exactly the hippie vibe I suspected I’d find when Rogan was describing his aunt.
The sun is high in the sky and doing its best to warm the somewhat chilly day, and my stomach tightens with nerves as we pull to a stop in a little clearing to the left of the property. I take it all in and once again marvel at witches living their best life. It seems, out here in some of the less populated parts of the state and country, there’s less hiding, and witches are freer to live how they want with no questions asked.
I wonder if the locals have their stories and suspicions about the people living amongst them in these parts. Although I suppose it’s just as likely that they’re oblivious. I find myself suddenly wanting to sit and talk with the people who live around here and see if they’ll spill the tea.
I get out of the car when Rogan does, following behind him like some lamb to the slaughter as he makes his way to the gate. It opens without so much as a squeak, which I find oddly impressive. I add it to the list of weird things that excite me now that I’m a witch. It’s written just under jackalope antlers and above the moon.
“Are you nervous?” I ask as Rogan leads me down a cobblestone path to the front door. I whisper the question as though the plants are spying on us, so I need to keep it down.
“Will you think of me as less of a man if I admit yes?” he asks me over his shoulder, also with a whisper.
“Obviously,” I tease.
“Then no, I’m not nervous in the slightest,” he replies, and I chuckle.
My laugh is a little too loud, and I almost shush myself and apologize to the plants for disturbing them, but then I realize that’s crazy and stop myself.
“Um, this place is having a weird effect on me,” I half warn, half observe.
“Yeah, it’s the plants, they have wards and other protections woven into them. It’ll get better once we’re in the house,” Rogan explains, but that doesn’t exactly make me feel better.
He turns to look at me, amusement tilting up the corners of his lips. “Depending on what’s in bloom in the garden, the effects change,” he informs me. “I once found Elon laughing his ass off in a patch of pineapple weed. He said he’d been there for hours,” he goes on, a full grin now stretched across his gorgeous face.